Frost & Sullivan Acclaims ISON's Strategy Of Diversifying Its Portfolio To Set Itself Apart In The West African BPO And Contact Centre Services Market

iSON's strategic acquisitions and partnerships have enabled it to outpace the competition in market and portfolio expansion

CAPE TOWN, South Africa, Nov. 22, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Based on its recent analysis of the business process optimization (BPO) industry market, Frost & Sullivan recognizes iSON BPO with the 2016 West African Frost & Sullivan Award for Competitive Strategy Innovation and Leadership. iSON BPO, a leading BPO and contact centre service provider, gave a huge boost to its market prospects by diversifying its services portfolio to cater to multiple industries. Its operational best practices and deployment of sophisticated tools have facilitated the integration of people, process, and technology, making it the service provider of choice in the West African market.

In addition to the standard services, such as inbound/outbound contact centre services for voice, chat, and email; HR management; and marketing services, iSON BPO stands out for offering:

content digitisation,

healthcare administration,

policy administration,

market research,

analytics,

social media support,

government to customer (G2C) services,

customer acquisition and campaign management,

customer on-boarding, and

customer retention/revenue assurance.

This variety in offering has aided the company's expansion beyond the telecommunications, banking, and financial industries, into newer verticals such as insurance, media and entertainment and education.

iSON BPO has grown through a sharp combination of organic and inorganic growth strategies. Its early partnership with Airtel Africa helped it gain a strong foothold in the telecommunications industry, while its acquisition of Spanco Limited (SPAL), strengthened its presence in Africa and India. It also employs Avaya's end-to-end platforms that comprise interactive voice response (IVR), automatic call distribution, and workforce optimization for improved IVR self-service, information-on-queue status, and visibility into real-time performance.

"iSON has cannily started setting up operations in Tier II cities in all West African countries that it operates in because semi-urban and rural population comprises 60% to 70% of the West African population," said Frost & Sullivan Research Analyst Deepti Dhinakaran. "This has allowed it to slash the cost of operations, while gaining a bigger and cheaper resource pool. The company recruits only local talent, and has a multilingual workforce that supports up to 30+ languages."

Receiving the Award, Global Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Pravin Kumar said, "The Competitive Strategy Innovation and Leadership Award by Frost and Sullivan is truly an honour. It gives me immense pleasure that iSON BPO is recognized for innovation and leadership in the West African market, even as we continue to make strategic investments to offer our services to other parts of Africa and extend our capacity and reach across the West African sub-region and beyond to create 'outsourcing' as a micro-economy in Africa, for Africa."

As a result of these strategies, iSON BPO accounts for close to 70% of the market share in the third-party contact centre space, with operations in Nigeria, Ghana, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso, Chad, and Niger. It currently has 18 centres in 15 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) with 10,000+ employees, while its nearest competitors have between 2,000 and 3,000 employees.

iSON BPO has invested substantially in creating a world-class service delivery infrastructure, while allowing its employees to use relevant technologies that ultimately raise customer service levels. It has rolled out rigorous up-skilling initiatives to equip agents with the required skill sets to handle tasks as they move up the hierarchy. It follows a completely process-driven methodology with global certifications such as Quality Management System (ISO (9001:2008) and Information Security Management System (ISO 27001:2013).